Zizzy Zizzlefritz

English 11, period 1

10-10-10

Gatsby Essay

A Jade Is Emerald Green

Jades are quite beautiful green stones. Many dream to own such a beauty. For more than two centuries, and particularly since its rise to world power after World War I, the United States has been a land of dreams in the eyes of millions, an idea strongly reflected in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s America can be seen as a land rising “in white heaps and sugar lumps,” representing the “wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world” (p. 73). So powerful is this vision of promise – especially the promise of potential financial prosperity – that it has inspired its own term, the American Dream, to encapsulate it. In The Great Gatsby, all of the characters who flit and flutter through Gatsby’s lavish parties, such as Jordan Baker, seem to embody the American Dream. In the end, however, Jordan’s version of the dream, while one of wealth, turns out to be nothing but a perverse and corrupted distortion of the promise America holds.

The first description of Jordan is that of a pampered young woman luxuriating on a couch in the home of her obscenely wealthy friend, Daisy. She seems to be living the good life so many dream of, a life of casual ease. Like Daisy and Tom, Jordan appears to exist in a world where “people played polo and were rich together” (p. 20). She is a woman who gets what she wants, having become a famous and successful professional golfer. In short, she apparently grasps the American Dream’s promise of material wealth in the palm of her hand.

A closer look at Jordan, however, reveals that her American Dream is corrupt. While the notion of achieving material prosperity has always been central to the dream, what Jordan overlooks is the fact that, in the original vision of the American Dream, such wealth comes as a result of hard work and discipline, qualities she distinctly lacks. Her success as a golfer, for instance, is the result of cheating, as Nick explains that

“[s]he was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty body” (p. 63).

Jordan was born into privilege, expected it as an inherent right, and was willing to do anything, no matter how underhanded, to maintain it. The self-made woman she most certainly is not.

Her essential selfishness is evident throughout the novel, whether in her “contemptuous expression” (p. 23), her “impersonal eyes” (p, 17), or her “bored haughty face” (p. 62). The ultimate sign of her corruption rears its ugly head near the end of the novel, after Myrtle’s gruesome death. Despite the fact that she and her friends had just witnessed and been involved in this horrible death, her only strong reaction comes as a result of Nick’s refusal to go with her into Daisy’s house, as seen when she tells him the next day that “You weren’t so nice to me last night” (p. 63). Such heartless and callous disregard for the value of human life is not exactly the primary appeal of the American Dream for most people.

Ultimately, one could argue that Jordan did, in fact, achieve the American Dream, in that she obviously does prosper financially and lives a life of comfort and security, sheltered from the reality of those who must live in America’s valleys of ashes. But at what cost does her success come? Her jaded and cynical attitude toward everything lies in stark contrast to the sense of hope and opportunity that have always been central to the dream, as well as to Gatsby’s admittedly mistaken sense of life’s promises. If the early Dutch sailors Nick speaks of viewed America as a “fresh, green breast of the new world” (p. 189), then Jordan’s vision of America and the American Dream can only be said to be a sickly green, poisoned by selfishness, far from any beautiful green jade that many covet.